MOTHER

My mother and father both belonged to Joe Ward at first but Ward died and his widow married Williams.  My mother told me and not only told me but showed me knots across her shoulder where they whipped her from seven in the morning until nine at night.  She went into the smoke house to get some meat and they closed in on her and shut the door and strung her up by her hands (her arms were crossed and a rope run from her wrists to the hook in the ceiling on which meat was hung).  There were three of them.  One would whip until he was tired, and then the other would take it up.

Some years after she got that whipping, her master’s child was down to the bayou playing in the water.  She told the child to stop playing in the water, and it did not.  Instead it threw dirt into the water that had the bluing in it.  Then she took the child and threw it into the Bayou.  Some way or other the child managed to scramble out.  When the child’s aunt herd it from the child, she questioned my mother and asked her if she did it.  My mother told her “Yes”.  Then she said.  “Well what do you want to own it for?  Don’t you know if they find it out they will kill you?”

HOW FREEDOM CAME

My mother said that an old white man came through the quarters one morning and said that they were all free—­that they could go away or stay where they were or do what they wanted to.  If you will go there, I can send you to an old man eighty-six years old who was in General Sherman’s army.  He came from Mississippi.  I don’t know where he was a slave.  But he can tell you when peace was declared aad what they said and everything.

WHAT THE SLAVES EXPECTED

The slaves were not expecting much but they were expecting more than they got.  I am not telling you anything I read in history but I have heard that there was a bounty in the treasury for the ex-slaves, and them alone.  And some reason or other they did not pay it off, but the time was coming when they would pay it off.  And every man or woman living that was born a slave would benefit from it.  They say that Abraham Lincoln principally was killed because he was going to pay this money to the ex-slaves end before they would permit it they killed him.  Old man White who lives out in the west part of town was an agent for some Senator who was in Washington, and he charged a dime and took your name and age and the place where you lived.

KU KLUX KLAN

They called the K.K.K.  “White Cape”.  Right there in my neighborhood, there was a colered man who hadn’t long come in.  The colored man was late coming into the lot to get the mule for the white man and woman he was working for.  The white man hit him.  The Negro knocked the white man down and was going to kill him when the white man begged him off, telling him that he wouldn’t let anybody else hurt him.  He (the Negro) went on off and never came back.  That night there were two hundred White Caps looking for him but they didn’t find him.